Disability Justice and Spirituality

Disability activism often starts with a call for accessible spaces—for ramps, interpreters, braille copies, and fragrance-free gatherings. But a deeper engagement with disability justice requires more than a series of accommodations: it requires a transformation of our core values and institutions.

Disability justice demands that human lives be valued not for their ability to create profit but for the divine spark within each of us. Meeting this demand in practice requires nothing less than what Tikkun has been calling for since its founding: a radical turn toward a society based on love and care rather than on profit and domination.

In this special issue, we share the perspectives of activists, theologians, and theorists writing from the front lines of disability justice work. Some expose the threat of violence against people with disabilities, from the everyday violence of harassment and exclusion to the acute violence of coercive medical interventions and electric shock treatments. Others describe beautiful new rituals and deep spiritual insights arising within disability culture. Some wrestle with scriptures that seem to equate disability with sinfulness, while others celebrate the fact that so many biblical prophets are people with disabilities—including Moses, who has a speech impediment, Isaac, who is blind, and Jacob, who develops a limp while wrestling with an angel. Together they articulate a prophetic approach to disability justice that is at once spiritual and political.

Long before Judaism and Christianity entered the world, ancient peoples celebrated the waning of the sun as winter deepened by creating celebrations of light and ceremonies to encourage the sun to return. Jews and Christians took this spirit of hopefulness and applied it to social, economic, and political contexts.

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How to Be an Activist

At a time when demonizing those who are not yet with us is commonplace and the political discourse is becoming more polarized, widening the political gap, insisting on seeing the humanity of others even when you despise their behavior, is a radical political act.

Become curious.

Ask not what is wrong with someone you don’t agree with, but rather what is driving them to support policies that are so hurtful to others.